Daniel Z. Freedman

Daniel Zissel Freedman (born March 5, 1939 in Hartford , Connecticut ) is an American theoretical physicist who is one of the co-founders of the theory of supergravity .

Life

Freedman studied at Wesleyan University and at the University of Wisconsin – Madison , where he received his doctorate in 1964 with a thesis on particle physics under Raymond F. Sawyer. 1964–1965 he was at Imperial College in London , 1965–1967 at the University of California, Berkeley and 1967–1968 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton . In 1968 he was assistant professor, 1970 associate professor and from 1975 professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook . From 1980 he was Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he has also been Professor of Physics since 2001. In 1974 and 1985 he was visiting professor at the École normal supérieure in Paris .

Freedman developed the theory of supergravity in 1976 with Peter van Nieuwenhuizen and Sergio Ferrara at the University of Stony Brook, for which he won the Dirac Medal (ICTP) of the ICTP in Trieste in 1993 , the Dannie Heineman Prize for mathematical physics in 2006 and the Special Fundamental Physics Prize . Among other things, he also worked on the AdS / CFT correspondence.